My post 2 previous was lost in the sauce. I am trying again. If the
other turns up, please burn that one before reading. I appreciate the
chance to revise and extend and I hope that I have made better use of
it. :-)
=======Werner Icking <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Don't think so. If e.g. with meter 12/8 a bar has only one 1/8th as
first note. How would you then notate the rests?
Chlapik recommends either r8 r8 r4 r8 r2d
or r8 r8 r4d r2d
not recommended is r8 r8 r4 r8 r4 r8
------------------
You have no idea how much this stuff helps me. Thank you much. :-)
If for some reason I were writing out an *alegrias* in 12/8 (instead of
12/4) I would write it in such a way that I could visually divide it
into four 3-beat parts, because that is how the *compas* is constructed.
To improvise or even play stuff like that it is necessary to use a
dancer's count (12) rather than a musician's count (3, and written in
3/4). If there were a complete measure with one note in it then in that
particular composition I would use as few rests as possible after the
first three beats. You can't generalize about compound meter situations
that much. All our notation is duple by default, so one could well
assume that *in general* 12/8 represented 3 12/4's rather than two 6/8's
(or four 3/4's) because if the composer wanted 6/8 he could have written
6/8. But no one writes music ``in general''.
One normally requires a visible 3rd beat in 4/4 only if there are eighth
notes present. I would use, in 4/4:
note8 r8 r4 r2 or perhaps in context in a ragtime piece: n8 r4 r8 r2
but this would not bother me one bit:
n4 r2 r8 n8 (I don't promise to use it.)
because the reader would already be safely past the middle of the
measure before he had to deal with the 8th notes, and IMHO it is only
the reader who should be considered.
All depends on the nature of the rest of the piece. It makes no sense to
carry that sort of thinking to extremes by making it apply to every
three or four beats in compound meters. Anyone reading any of your
examples is going to find the next bar without difficulty, because there
is only one note, and it's in the beginning.
In 12/8: n8 r8 r4 r1 16/8: n8 r8 r4 r2 r1
20/8: n8 r8 r4 r1 r1
The underlying assumption in this academic's preference for the dotted
rest is that a rest with an augmentation dot is in some way more
symmetrical than a rest accompanied by another rest of half its value.
How can this be so? The dot means increased by half. It is placed at the
*end* of the rest. There is no implication or hint or nuance of
difference nor symmetry in the substitution of a dot for a rest. It
merely adds unwelcome complexity. Our time values are by halves, and the
preference for 2 over 3 is built into the system. Dotted rests would not
make it one bit less so. There is no difference whatever in meaning
between r4d and r4 r8. r4d=r4+r8. r4d is just bad notation. Dotted half
or whole notes are particularly repellent concepts, because they are so
egregiously unnecessary. Use them in good health. I was only citing the
dotted rest as an *example* of bad notation which has gained too much
acceptance, nothing more. I did not say or mean that nobody likes them,
or even that most don't love them. :-)
I have greater problem with some other practices. I feel that the
readability
of scribbled music should be taken into account in printing practices,
so that there is minimal drifting apart in style between what composers
write by hand and what ends up printed (except clefs). This is a concern
of any composer who has ever taken music to an engraver or typesetter.
The interaction is something like this. :-)
You may be aware that
music copyists had slightly different conventions in the placement of
noteheads on stems. They cannot be considered to have been any less
expert than engravers or even academics. They are gone, but my point is
that drifting apart can happen and it has happened, even among undoubted
experts. IMHO a square tuplet bracket is unacceptable because it looks
too much like an additional beam when scribbling, because who pauses
when in the throes of creation to shade the beams? It is also a minus
that any dot looks too much like a note head if you write fast enough. I
am not taking an extreme view. I love dotted notes. I just think that
the legibility of hasty
writing should be considered and that the benefit, if any, of a practice
should be weighed against the likelihood that it may subject the music
to more errors by those who write by hand, for whatever reason. To do
otherwise is to prune the tree by hacking at the roots. There exists an
excellent historical example: To improve
the legibility of Church communications the people who designed the
Italic hand (chancery cursive) centuries ago (and it was designed, it
did not evolve) decided that two strokes should be used instead of one
for both of the most common letters: e and t. Today hasty writing in
Italic style remains more legible than hasty writing in more modern
styles.
The best example of which I know of total ineptitude in this regard:
Someone in MENC (The Music Educator's National Conference, a USA
organization) thought that it would be a good idea to use a triangle
(delta)7 instead of the cumbersome maj7 for writing the chord of that
name. (French: 7M). I have seen stuff sketched this way, and I was hard
pressed to tell the delta from a D or even a C or F. I am at a loss to
imagine why it never occurred to that educator to put a line through the
7 (or an additional line) in the manner of baroque figured bass, which
any trained musician would comprehend very quickly without explanation,
instead of inventing such nonsense. I suppose that the educator had
never heard of figured bass. !-)
Who is Chlapik? :-)
--
Peace, understanding, health and happiness to all beings!
U U u ^^ ` 'U u U ''`'`
_-__o|oO|o-_|o_o_-_MN[-->mm@_-_--___o|o|oU_|o_o__lilypond
dave N Va USA David Raleigh Arnold [EMAIL PROTECTED]
